Well there seems to be a mentor system over live that could help beginners. There's also a tutorial and tooltips to tell you about effects of cards and other such things. Try the demo as that will give you an idea of whether or not you'll find it comprehendible.

EDIT: speedofthepuma. Basically you have a deck of cards that is either one single colour (from a choice of 5) or else a combination of colours. These colours are related to your spells; Red = Attack & Instant Damage, Blue = Spells and Counterspells, Green = Creatures and buffs, Black = Damage and card destruction and White = Healing. All the colours have creature cards and enchantments, instants (cards you can play at any point in the game regardless if it's your turn or not) and sorcery cards.

In order to play a card you must have enough mana, these are related to the colour of your deck so Red = Mountain, Blue = Island, Green = Forest, Black = Swamp and White = Plains. You are allowed place one mana card per turn, so it takes time in order to receive enough mana to play your powerful spells.

The aim of the game is to deplete the other players life, through your own spells and creature attacks. You start the game by drawing 7 cards (ideally 3 or 4 of these cards should be mana) and then the fun begins.

There's more to it than that but that's the basic premises and its made this probably the longest forum post I've ever written! Hope it helps!

If you like this sort of thing its well worth 800 points imo. Few niggly bugs (one where the game asks you to discard a card but you cant - fixed by pushing up on the left stick) but otherwise Stainless have done a great job.

Used to play Magic 10+years ago, so was quite easy for me to get back into it. Hope they just add new decks over time and avoid going into micro transaction hell.

Baten Kaitos on the Cube also had a card battle system, speedofthepuma.

Give the trial a go if you're unsure, the tutorial explains things pretty well. Never played MTG (I'm 30, so the craze for the cards kicked off too late for me) but the potential depth to the game is obvious after playing the trial. I didn't like it enough to buy it yet, but I can feel there's a chance I might warm to it after a few more goes on the demo.

This is absolutely awful, you can't really change the decks as they come, all you can do is add cards to them, the interface is unbelievably clunky and slow and the decks are far too basic to have any kind of strategy. The free trial you get with Magic Online is far superior.

bit harsh to say the interface is clunky... you are using a control pad, it was never going to be as slick as MTG which has the rather substantial advantage of a mouse pointer. All things considered its pretty good I reckon.

Though I agree about the deck customisation. I think its a good thing that you can't build an entirely new deck from scratch, as then noobs would be faced with some highly tuned pro decks all the time and soon lose interest, but it does frustrate me that I can't take any of the obvious junky cards out of some decks. (e.g. those bloody craw wurms in the starting green deck) or fix the more glaring mana issues on some of the multi-coloured decks (a three colour deck using basic land should not be running four Furnace Whelps! WTF?!)

The AI makes some odd decisions but MTG is a surprisingly complicated game to teach a computer to play, so that seems fair enough, and I'm definitely enjoying it overall, and the final deck that Tezzerek the bummer (or whatever his name is) is pretty much a tourney-standard deck built around an artifact creatures concept. Sadly it doesnt look like you can unlock that one, so I'm guessing its DLC for the future (which kinda raises some issues I suspect cos its brutally strong compared to the others in the game)

seriously though I dunno if making the decks IS all that much fun if you play in an online environment. Without the limiting effect of "what cards you can afford/own" the online game quickly degenerates into two or three known "best" decks and then you aren't making a deck anyway, you are just picking from much better precons with even less choice than you'd have now.

Just played a guy online, demolished him pretty nicely cos he'd added those silly lifegain artifacts to his mono green beatdown deck, so there IS some deck construction elements to the game

I played a guy last night with and he ragequit on me when I steamrolled him! He chose an opening hand that only had 2 mana, muppet! The green/black Elf deck destroyed him, specially considering the amount of beats you can get out and then playing coat of arms!

I'm getting really sick of people quitting games I'm about to win. Something like half the games I've won, or would have, my opponent has buggered off before the end. Anyone else finding this or am I just getting really unlucky with opponents?

Oh and can someone explain how the 3 and 4 player matches work? I've only played standard 2 player matches up to now.

It's Magic The Gathering in game form. If that's your cup of tea, it does the job quite nicely. I was concerned it wouldn't allow me to play cards to interrupt things in the same way, but it does just fine. Well worth a punt I'd say, though I now prefer the Free Realms TCG since I realised quickly I'm not good at M:TG. I can only get thrashed so much!

Absolute beginner here, bought M:TG at the weekend - as mentioned, it does a pretty good job of being a virtual card game, nicely presented but a bit ponderous.

Good tutorial, and a big glossary, has answered all my questions so far.

Not much to the campaign I have seen so far (certainly nothing like Puzzle Quest), campaign seems to be just a dozen or so battles to win against gradually stronger opponents, plus a few challenges. Replay value (other than the online, which I haven't tried yet) comes in the form of a new card unlocked for each battle victory, even if it's someone in the campaign you've already beaten.

Worth a buy I would say, not spectacular but all-in-all pretty good value.

CalmBlueOcean wrote:
seriously though I dunno if making the decks IS all that much fun if you play in an online environment. Without the limiting effect of "what cards you can afford/own" the online game quickly degenerates into two or three known "best" decks and then you aren't making a deck anyway, you are just picking from much better precons with even less choice than you'd have now.

You could easily add a filter for "custom decks" and "pre-built decks", though. So if you wanted, you could play with ONLY people using the pre-built decks.

I recently quit playing Magic as I was spending way too much money and then being too busy at work to play. I enjoy the black cards more than any other colour. I am enjoying this game but am a little wary of the amount of micro-transactions that will appear.

I am playing through the tournament mode with the green deck at the moment. The wolf token card was pretty sweet it came out when I was going to win anyway. I suspect it might be a win more kinda card.